Comicdashery! or “My Sophomore Slump Blogging, My Junior Year of Not Getting Laid”

The big finish to Scott Snyder’s “Black Mirror” arc and the last issue of the 70-something year old series. Unfortunately the thing feels pretty truncated. A 11 issue story is a weird number and a first clue that Snyder probably had to cut some shit and abandon the slow burn tension of the run to get ready for the DC relaunch and his Greg Capullo-drawn Batman series. Pages and pages of James Gordon Jr. monologuing about how awesome being a sociopath is because your clarity of thought when you don’t care about others is like that episode of Seinfeld where George has to give up sex with his girlfriend and he starts getting his brain power back. What made James Junior effective was his quiet menace and here at the end he just becomes obvious, a boring Serial Killer who hacks people up Saw-style in his basement till Batman punches him in the face. I was just expecting something more sophisticated I guess. What Snyder could of done with another issue will be one of those what if’s that’ll have to be around for awhile.

Justice League #1

Without the expectation of this being the barometer of quality for the DC relaunch, when one whose familiar with the work of Geoff Johns and Jim Lee individually considers what each brings to the table of whatever project they work on than this is certainly exactly how I would imagine “Geoff Johns and Jim Lee do the Justice League” turning out. The characters are broad and literal enough to have “distinct” personalities and Lee’s flash and expansive vistas, along with John’s current disposition to give up story space to a splash because he does all his scripts on an airplane/in an airport/between meetings and that’s less he’ll have to write, means this fucker’s plot is going to be slow going. It’s also going to be the slickest, flashiest, surface-level superhero comic out there and its gonna shine like a silver cock on an iPad.

Essential Spider-Man Vol. 10

There’s a story in here where Sandman and Hydro-Man smash together and become a mindless mud monster that falls in love with a barskank. The barskank sells the mud monster out as Broadway show and then the mud monster loses its shit because the barskank is acting like a skank. And then the rest of the comic plays out like the last 10 minutes of King Kong but with Spider-Man there too, the barskank turns out to have feelings. It’s weird and entertaining and oddly touching and these days you have to read that Stephanie Brown Batgirl comic or something by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning B-titles instead of Amazing Spider-Man to read stories that still try this sort of thing and I’m not doing that because I don’t give a shit about those enough to plunk down $3 + tax for em’.